Following upon last year discussions initiated on Twitter via #buildyourownportus and in the course and summarised in a post by Matthew Tyler-Jones on "The Portus MOOC and modelling", I have found extremely interesting how many people wanted to build their own Portus model and experience modelling as interpretative process.
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The ongoing Portus Project excavations being undertaken under the aegis of the second season of the Portus Field School were the object of a recent visit by the Italian Minister of Culture last week.
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You can now register to join the second version of the Archaeology of Course: exploring the lost harbour of ancient Rome course run by the University of Southampton and FutureLearn. You can register via this link.
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In the previous post by Stephen Kay on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles at Portus he discussed the work that has been completed on site in terms of capturing aerial photography. Aerial photography plays a significant part within the understanding of any archaeological site and this is especially true at Portus.
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Researchers from the universities of Southampton and Cambridge have discovered a new section of the boundary wall of the ancient Roman port of Ostia, proving the city was much larger than previously estimated. The team, led by Professor Simon Keay (Southampton) and Professor Martin Millet (Cambridge), has been conducting a survey of an area of land lying between Ostia and Portus.
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Since the start of excavations by the Portus Project in 2007, aerial photography has played an important role in the recording, analysis and presentation of the research. The ability for the archaeologist to have a bird’s-eye view of an excavation gives the opportunity to see the plan of structures, their relationships with each and alignments which are not visible at ground level.
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During the 2013 excavation season I completed a number of laser scan models of the site, adding to the already completed laser scan models collected in 2012 at the Palazzo Imperiale.
The main focus of the 2013 season was trialling a new scanner, the Faro Focus 3D, to see how the advancements in scanning time and accuracy could aid our recording of the site.
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As large-scale data processing becomes easier and more affordable to everyone, so too increases the temptation to try and use new technologies and methods to reduce the amount of manual labor that usually comes with classifying and categorising big data collections. With textual data, the techniques of extracting useful information from unstructured data have already been more or less established.
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The Portus Project, comprising the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma, the British School at Rome and the University of Southampton, has commissioned Franco Mapelli to give a visual interpretation of the Archaeological Park of the Trajanic Port. This exhibition is made up of 30 large-scale photographs through which the photographer focuses on the relationship between archaeological remains and nature.
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